My Daughter, My Coach
In the latest chapter of Life Imitates Art, I’m now consulting with my daughter, Miki, to shake alcohol dependence, a striking parallel to the characters in my novel. Miki is part of a youth movement away from alcohol, 720 days without a drink, and counseling others as a Life Coach.
How Do We Get to the Government We Need?
“Abundance,” a new book by journalists Ezra Klein of The New York Times and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, offers a recipe to reorganize government operations to work better, rather than to bleed or eliminate them as Elon Musk’s DOGE “efficiency” experts have done.
Still Learning to Balance Qi
Nobody gets out of here alive, of course, but we want to live our best life, with as much of our faculties as we can preserve, over time.
Fight or Flight: Trump Poses Dilemma
Justina Lennox, a transgender woman, fled her home in Fort Worth, Texas, last week and is planning to resettle in Canada. She’s one of many Americans whose sense of foreboding over the coming of a second Trump administration has pushed them to expatriate rather than stay in their homeland.
Birthday Party
I remember 1976, the 200th anniversary of the nation’s founding. The world was in turmoil, as it is today, when the 250th birthday party is in the offing. We were coming out of Vietnam, the exit of a disgraced president, and facing an energy crisis controlled by a cartel of rich Arab sheiks who ruled…
Crowd-sourcing an American Novel
For more than 30 years, I’ve been germinating what I consider to be a brilliant idea for a novel and I’ve concluded, finally, that I must be suffering from writer’s block. I’ve barely even started. It’s not that I can’t write. I’ve been writing professionally since high school, recruited after winning a state speech contest,…
A Reliable Narrator
To create the flawed character of Ray James, the protagonist in The Return Trip, I drew on the advice of substance-abuse counselors, psychological and behavioral studies, internal energy arts training, holistic health gurus, and my own experiences dealing with alcohol and other drugs. For all its sexual adventurism and political intrigue, The Return Trip at…
The Warrior Within
Memories of my brief military life rush back to me each Veterans Day, when we honor the service of so many men and women who joined up and shipped out for military missions. I volunteered with the U.S. Air Force to learn Chinese (and some Vietnamese), and fly reconnaissance missions along China’s coast, and over…